Playing Fantasy VC Portfolio

During the 2009–2011 period, I made a startup list on Twitter. They were the project that fascinated me the most at the time. The name of this list was “Startup I wanna to invest”.

The goal was to follow the evolution of these startups and learn from it. But also to see if I had a good investment intuition and see if it could help me develop a kind of pattern recognition.

My portfolio has 43 deals.

• 14 of them failed
• 7 when through an acquihire deal, thus no return
• 7 still alive, but they will just survive, making themselves nice SMBs, thus almost no-return
• 6 are still growing and generating interesting revenues. They could exit, perhaps around $100M to $300M: Mailjet, HackerRank, SkillShare, Gumroad, Banjo, and Uberconference.
• 1 who is well-performing, close to the unicorn league: Mixpanel
• 4 unicorns that haven’t exited yet: Asana, Stripe, Postmates, and Quora
• 4 exits, 3 tiny ones (Leetchi, Cue and Soluto) and 1 big exit (Nest)

The performance of the fund is quite good. With an estimate of $75,9M invested, the current exits generated a return of $286M (thanks to Nest). While the potential return from the one that didn’t exist yet hold an estimated value of $2.408B.

The fund has made x3,8 is initial value and could make up to x35,5 if the reminding startups would perform as they should do…not bad hey! 😂 💪 🦄

Appendix:

1/ Portfolio overview: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DqGQhRuqqDstVffCfSLZ8O3SZTcHD7ptaYJ4zCO6Z9g/edit#gid=0

2/ Screenshot Twitter list: https://twitter.com/julien99/lists/startup-i-wanna-to-invest/members